Once in a while, you come across some script that cannot be rendered on screen because you don't have the necessary font. If you are content with English only, then you can ignore this little annoyance. But if you speak another language or a foreign language student, you probably want to get a complete package of multilingual fonts.
As a Linux user, I found it sometimes frustrating or bothersome to have lack of a complete assortment of multilingual fonts. So I looked for fonts of many modern and ancient scripts on the Internet. The following is a list of fonts I collected that allow rendering of all the characters on the Web. You can use these fonts to write multilingual documents, too. A good place to test these fonts on the Web is the Wikipedia homepage.
Basic Minimal Fonts
You need the following font packages for basic rendering of Latin and Western-European alphabets. I use a Debian-based Linux system, so the following packages have Debian package names:
- ttf-bitstream-vera or
- ttf-dejavu
- latex-xft-fonts
Foreign Language Fonts
Additionally you need to download the following TrueType or OpenType fonts to view many foreign scripts other than English and Western European languages. Be aware that the following list is for a minimal multilingual system. There are many more fonts than listed below. You can use Yahoo! Search to find where to download these fonts. Below the contents of my /usr/local/share/fonts directory is shown.
AboriginalSansBOLD.ttf AboriginalSansBOLDITALIC.ttf AboriginalSansITALIC.ttf AboriginalSansREGULAR.ttf AboriginalSerifBOLD.ttf AboriginalSerifBOLDITALIC.ttf AboriginalSerifITALIC.ttf AboriginalSerifREGULAR.ttf Aegean.otf FM-MalithiUW46.ttf Phetsarath_OT.ttf TagDoc93.ttf akshar.ttf arheiu30.ttf cursor-felipe.pcf.gz damase_v.2.ttf dilyan.ttf encodings.dir estre.ttf evermono.ttf fonts.cache-1 fonts.dir fonts.scale gulim16uni.pcf.gz h2mjsb.ttf h2mjsm.ttf hapaxber.ttf hei16ascii.pcf.gz joyig.ttf malgun.ttf malgunbd.ttf micross.ttf mm3.ttf mond40uhgs.ttf nastaliq_unicode.ttf newathu.ttf paisan98.ttf raavi.ttf silyi.ttf simsun16ascii.pcf.gz tagbanwa.ttf tahoma.ttf tahomabd.ttf taileval.ttf tashi.ttf tituscbz.ttf uchen.ttf vrinda.ttf
